The Analog Kid blog has been featuring out-of-print ’80s albums on “The Lost Boys” series for quite a while, and now it’s time for the ’70s to join the party! “Lost In The Flood: Hard-To-Find ’70s Albums” will give you the chance to listen to some great music from the ’70s that can no longer be easily acquired on-line or at your local record store (especially since many of you probably no longer even HAVE a local record store!).

Neil Diamond began his recording career with Bang Records in the mid-’60s, and all of his famous early singles (“Solitary Man,” “Kentucky Woman,” and “Cherry Cherry” among them) were released by the label. By 1968, Neil had moved on to greener pastures with Uni/MCA (and, eventually, Columbia), but that didn’t stop Bang from capitalizing on Diamond’s new-found stardom. The label released multiple compilations without Neil’s involvement in the early ’70s, and one of those albums was 1973’s Double Gold.

Double Gold was released at the height of Diamond’s post-Hot August Night fame, and it’s actually a really nice collection of the majority of his Bang recordings. It even contains two songs that never appeared on a Diamond album for Bang: “Crooked Street” and “Shot Down.” Both are likely demo recordings that were never intended to be released, and Diamond certainly wasn’t happy about their inclusion. These two songs were excluded from the 2011 compilation Neil Diamond: The Bang Years 1966-1968, and neither track has ever been officially released on CD.

The rest of Double Gold features the best stereo versions of songs from Neil’s two Bang albums (1966’s The Feel Of Neil Diamond and 1967’s Just For You). The Bang Years compilation from 2011 sounds fantastic, but it features the original mono mixes rather than the stereo tracks. Many of these mixes are quite different from their mono counterparts, and in some cases even the vocal track is different. Double Gold will certainly never see the light of day on CD, so I have done my best to properly transfer these classic recordings to digital for you. If you’re a Neil fan like I am, I’ve got the feeling that you’re going to die when you hear them…

Note: the four bonus tracks are the only four songs that Neil Diamond recorded for Bang that do not appear on Double Gold. So yeah, this post contains every single solitary song that Neil released on Bang Records. Neat, eh?

I have been looking for this on CD for over a decade! And now… here it is, all digitized and ready to download.
I don’t know if you have any idea how much this means to me… Maybe you do.
Either way, THANK YOU so very much!!!

I have about 12 of Neil Diamond albums from the seventies in storage, including the Double Gold, but I don’t think I gave the Bang Years. Are any of his albums from the seventies selling to collectors?

The Bang records are worth a little something if they’re in really good shape (especially the first 2 studio albums). There are millions of copies of those ’70s LPs on Uni/MCA and Columbia, so they don’t really fetch much on the open market.